István's restaurant

István's restaurant is a Ystad dining place whose importance to the case lies in a brief encounter: a man using the name Fu Cheng pays with a forged card and makes eye contact with Sonja Hökberg. The restaurant links the girls' movements to the investigation of Tynnes Falk, although the meaning of the connection remains uncertain when Wallander first pursues it.

Setting and First Lead

Wallander learns that a restaurant visit may matter while trying to establish whether the girls had any earlier contact with taxi driver Johan Lundberg. A call from American Express gives him a different lead: the card number used at István's restaurant belongs on paper to Fu Cheng, but the account is fictitious, and American Express has never opened an account under that name. The restaurant will not be paid, and the supposed Hong Kong address offers no reliable identity.

The payment turns a routine transaction into evidence of deliberate concealment. Wallander understands that the man may exist, but that the name and address attached to the card are false. He also knows that this visitor made eye contact with Sonja Hökberg. The encounter places an unidentified man in the same room as one of the two girls before the investigation has established why their paths might have crossed.

The Visit Reconstructed

In Wallander's later reconstruction, two girls go out for beer, and at some point change places while a man sits at a nearby table. He pays with the false American Express account bearing Fu Cheng's name and a Hong Kong address. A couple of hours later, the girls order a taxi to Rydsgård and attack the driver. The sequence gives the restaurant visit a position in the evening's chronology, but does not by itself establish that the man caused the change of places or took part in the attack.

The restaurant's importance therefore rests on an unresolved conjunction: a false identity, a sighting of Hökberg, and the girls' later crime. At a team meeting, Wallander reports his visit and the card discovery, insisting that the man must be found so the police can rule out his involvement. The lead is investigative rather than conclusive; the false account sharpens the mystery without yet explaining it.

A Link to Falk's Apartment

As Wallander searches for a focal point in the case, he returns to the restaurant visitor. The man had appeared not only there but also in a group photograph in Falk's living room, a photograph taken during a later break-in at the apartment. Wallander regrets that he had not taken the photograph himself, because he could then have asked the restaurant owner to identify the visitor. The lost opportunity makes the restaurant more than a place where a false card was used: it is also a possible source of recognition that the investigation can no longer easily recover.

The photograph is described in the investigation as showing three men holding up a salmon on a fishing trip in Norway in 1983. Its presence in Falk's apartment and the visitor's appearance in the restaurant bring the two strands of the case closer, but Wallander still cannot say what joins them. The restaurant thus functions as a modest, concrete point on a map of increasingly entangled evidence: an ordinary public setting where a concealed identity briefly meets Hökberg, and where the investigation finds a lead it cannot yet interpret.